Tag: technology

The return of Chaos Manor Reviews

It’s good to see Jerry Pournelle back on his feet again, or rather, back at his desk. As usual, he is full of technological insight:

As of Summer 2014, a large percentage of jobs – I now believe more than 45% within ten years – can be done by a robot costing no more than a year’s salary to the current human worker. With the government keeping interest rates low this raises the temptation to borrow capital and – instead of paying it to a worker – using it to buy a robot that will pay for itself after a year, and thereafter require only maintenance and power, and when that robot is no longer useful it can be scrapped rather than being paid to retire. This will have an inevitable effect on the economy. It may have a direct effect on you.

I got into the computer revolution when my mad friend Dan MacLean talked me into investing $12,000 dollars in 1978 money – a considerable sum in those days – in an S-100 bus 2 megahertz 64 Kilobyte computer, a large green screen monitor that displayed 16 lines of 64 characters, and a Diablo printer that looked like a huge typewriter and which would print several pages a minute on fan-folded “computer paper”.

My wife thought I was mad, but my productivity increased enormously. No longer did I have to use Correcttape and various liquid paints and carbon paper. What I wrote improved, because I could rewrite sentences when needed as well as fix the torrent of typographical errors I made without having to retype the entire page after an edit.

The system paid for itself in a few months. I had already published a number of science fiction stories by the time I met Carl Helmers and we agreed that BYTE needed a User’s Column written not by a computer scientist but by a writer doing useful work on these little beasts. I still continue that tradition.

The point of that story is that in their forty or so years of existence, affordable small computers have completely changed the writing profession, and the changes continue now. It’s the same with the music profession: before small computers, performers were at the mercy of producers and publishers who had the enormously expensive equipment needed to make professional quality recordings, as well as the means for publishing musical works.

That’s all changed. For the past decade any competent performing group can either buy professional quality recording and editing equipment, or hire that work done for reasonable fees. They no longer have to sign egregious contracts giving nearly everything – sometimes including their own names – to the publisher, resulting in the ridiculous situation of one major performer changing his name to “The Artist Formerly Known as Prince” so that he could publish his own works once he could afford to.

Similar advances in technology are changing the movie industry and the health profession. They have caused the invention of podcasting, and improved many other human activities – and of course technology is changing computer programming.

From Iain M. Banks and Charles Stross to John C. Wright, science fiction writers have contemplated the Post-Scarcity economies, but few appear to have thought very deeply about Post-Labor economies. The two have similar attributes, but they are most certainly not the same. Unfortunately, that extension of the so-called Knowledge Economy appears to be rapidly upon us; there are few things so inaptly misnamed as the so-called “knowledge worker”, who for the most part doesn’t need to know anything at all.

It reminds me of how a friend in the tech-investment sector says that he’s never seen bigger deals, or fewer of them. And of how the mid-list authors are being abandoned by publishers, who increasingly insist their authors go big or go home. It appears we are increasingly living in a winner-take-all world where the robots work and the rest of us are all in the entertainment industry, competing to entertain one another.

How can this be sustainable? And who, beyond the winners taking all, is going to want to sustain it? Compared to some of the nightmare scenarios one can envision, it shouldn’t be too surprising that the 7th century philosophy of the neo-caliphate looks attractive by comparison.

An Open Source project

Calling all interested programmers:

We have a potential problem down the road. Our favored means of making ebooks is to construct them manually, which permits us to create very clean, professional ebooks without all the extra HTML trash that is an artifact of converting files from the various word processors. We do this with a program called Sigil, which is open source software, but unfortunately Sigil is no longer being maintained.

Some of the functionality of Sigil is being brought into Calibre, which is an excellent Open Source program, but is not focused on ebook production and has an editor that is more limited in its capabilities. Calibre also now requires QT5, which means those using older OS like XP cannot use it.

Now, other than a few minor features it would be nice to add for the sake of efficiency, Sigil works perfectly fine now. It’s not an immediate problem. But, as the EPUB standard changes over time, that may not always be the case. So, I’d like to find a programmer or two with OSS experience, and one or two programmers interested in gaining OSS experience, to keep Sigil alive. We have the server space that can be used to host it and are quite willing to provide it, so if you’re a programmer who is genuinely interested in helping maintain and improve Sigil, please shoot me an email with SIGIL in the subject.

If you want to have a look at the source code first, you can DL the 12MB file here.

UPDATE: Good news. The project leader, John, says that the project was merely pining for the fjords for lack of contributors. He’s quite happy to advise and so forth. We’ve got six or seven volunteers so far, so I’ll get in touch with everyone via email tonight and we can discuss what to do first.

The big question/problem is QT. John’s current plan is to go foward with QT 5.3, which rules out XP and that user base. So, the question is what is the best way to get the new user features into a version that does not require the latest QT short of a fork.

The problem with STEM

What people fail to realize is that the problem in the tech industry isn’t that there aren’t enough women getting STEM degrees, the problem is that too many are doing so:

Research shows women share negative experiences far more widely than men. Does that have an impact on diversity? Do women start avoiding certain companies because they are well informed about the culture?

Barbara: Absolutely. There were two technology companies which had this enormous turnover, and we actually tracked where the women went. And again, these companies had this huge focus on recruiting women but the culture wasn’t inclusive or gender intelligent, and so the women would end up leaving.

We have these amazing women with STEM degrees, and they’re shelving that education and going off to do something else.

When we tracked down where they went, what we found is that they went to smaller or mid-sized companies, or some of them just left the sector. They would say, “I do not even want to be in technology anymore.” So here we have these amazing women with STEM degrees, and they’re shelving that education and going off to do something else.

What’s one of the most common frustrations you hear from women in the tech sector?

Barbara: One female engineer described it as a drip-drip-drip: it’s not just one thing that happens once. She calls it being “cleverly dismissed.” So, she’ll bring up a concern or something, and it gets cleverly dismissed. If you have these drip-drip experiences of feeling excluded and dismissed over years and years, this is where women don’t feel valued for their intellect, for their ideas, or for the different way of thinking they bring, which is so useful and so important.

That’s one aspect of the problem right there. The “different way of thinking they bring” is neither useful nor important. It’s irrelevant. All those clever dismissals are just the tech gammas being nice to their coworkers, because in most cases the correct response to the concerns being raised would be: “what on Earth does that have to do with our actual objectives and responsibilities?”

The main reason there are not more women actually doing technology-related work in the technology sector despite their expensive STEM degrees is a very simple one: all those amazing women don’t like the nature of the actual work itself. They’re not good at it, they don’t like it, and so they tend to gravitate towards tangentially related sectors, like marketing technology or selling it.

Which is fine, but it’s hardly an efficient use of resources or an indicator that forcing even less-interested women into the field is a good idea.

So much for the Cloud

I’ve always thought the idea of putting your data up on someone else’s server was absolutely and utterly retarded. I’ve turned down more offers of cloud-based storage than I can recall for just that reason. But most people don’t understand that because MPAI. So, it seems likely that what 4chan is calling “The Fappening” (one has to love the way those guys name things) is going to throw a monkeywrench into more than a few business plans, including those belonging to Apple and Microsoft, because even idiots can understand the problem when naked pictures of celebrities are involved.

In case you’re not aware of what happened, a hacker got access to a number of directories belonging to celebrities and discovered that a number of young actresses such as Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton, and Kirsten Dunst rather like to take pictures of themselves sans clothing. Which is a fine, time-honored tradition, of course, but again, storing those pictures on public servers protected by dubious security is not exactly what one would describe as the technologically sound option.

Another purge?

There are claims there has been another purging of a tech organization, albeit this time with the full knowledge of the founder:

I need for this info to get out. Most of the mods on 4chan have only been in that position for a couple of weeks.

The day after the #ShutDown4CHAN thing happened in july, moot called a meeting with all the mods in a IRC. He said that a girl did atempt suicide and that she had connections and they wanted blood.

Moot demanded that we use everything we can to remove anything wanting to “fuck up sjw shit”. Needless to say alot of mod anons called out moot and were kicked from the chat.

Before one was kicked he told every mod agianst this shit to meet in a 4craft server. We all did and discussed how fucked up this was. Over the next few days our chats about it became emails wich became skype calls. In the end we agreed that the next big fuck up the sjws make then we will let whatever happens happen.

What came next was dashcon.

We let the discussion go on like normal. Some mods did moots bidding and banned. Others were in the threads bumping. What was left was nearly 2/3 of 4chan`s given the boot.

We we’re all purged and outed. We fell on eachother and to bitch and moan. I swear to god our chatlogs the day after must look like mr. meeseeks.

One ousted mod anon was also a mod for 420chan and wizardchan. He said that alot of the mods thier were also exiled.

He gave proof, in the form of a collection of perma banned notices for dozens of IPs. And a list of those same IPs in log records for mod services.

We flipped our shit and began looking for more chans that this had happened to. 7chan, mchan, getchan and even shrekchan had massive mod axeings on the same day as 4chan.u

The next day a mod who wasnt outed contacted us. To our horror he told us that the new mods are complete sjws and openly call for permabans for alot of 4chan “board culture”.

As we dug deeper we found out that the same thing was happening to alot of subreddits. Normally we would say fuck em. But they told us that tons of non sjw mods had thier accounts sieged and them ip banned.

Deeper we dug and found out that dozens of forum mods and website mods were either changed or became rabbid sjw over night.

Currently this is the deepiest we have dug. The girl who attempted suicide was kassie washington, niece of nick denton owner and publisher of gawker media

There is only one answer to this exclusionary behavior, of course. Start your own organization. Build it up. And then POLICE YOUR ORGANIZATION’S DECISION-MAKERS on a regular basis. Any sign of supporting “inclusion” or “outreach” or posturing for PC approval should be grounds for immediate removal from any decision-making responsibilities.

My purging from SFWA was, as I warned at the time, a small harbinger of much bigger things to come. Don’t think you’re safe simply because you’re not controversial. It’s not only the controversy they hate, or even the open resistance, it is the mere fact of failing to kowtow to their dogma.

The H1B lie

It is readily apparent that there is no shortage of American tech workers when the Americans are being let go in order to hire the cheaper Indians, either via offshore outsourcing or immigration:

At A.B.’s company, about 220 IT jobs have been lost to offshore outsourcing over the last year. A.B. is telling the story because, initially, there was little knowledge among fellow employees about H-1B visa holders and how they are used. They didn’t know that offshore outsourcing firms are the largest users of H-1B visas, or exactly how this visa facilitates IT job losses in the U.S.

“I think once we learned about it, we became angrier toward the U.S. government than we were with the people that were over here from India,” A.B. said, “because the government is allowing this.”

The IT workers at this firm first learned of the offshore outsourcing threat through rumors. Later, the IT staff was called into an auditorium and heard directly from the CIO about the plan to replace them. It would take months for the transition to be completed, in part because of some new system installations.

Many younger IT workers found jobs and left. Mainframe workers were apparently in demand and also able to find new jobs. But older workers with skills in open systems, storage and SAN faced a harder time. About half the IT staffers, mostly the older ones, would stay to the end.

Training the replacement workers involved holding morning-long WebEx meetings several times a week with offshore outsourcing staff based in India. The sessions were recorded as details about the environment, including diagrams and scripts, were shared.

The entire foundation of free trade is a lie. There are multiple flaws in David Ricardo’s comparative advantage argument that I have previously pointed out – do a search or go through the Free Trade tag if you’re interested. So it should be totally unsurprising that the justifications for the H1B visas are lies as well.

What does the consensus say?

Jerry Pournelle considers the veracity of some claims concerning reactionless drive inventions:

I would very much like to see a proof of principle for a reactionless drive: a way to convert angular momentum into linear momentum, angular acceleration into linear acceleration, some new cosmic principle that requires energy conservation but does not require equal and opposite reaction; and indeed I applaud NASA for doing the tests.

However, it is my understanding that the current tests have been done in air, using torsion to measure acceleration, and that is suspect to me: I’d prefer they used gravity (a swing) and a vacuum chamber. If that’s too hard to arrange, put a garbage bag around the entire apparatus.

Complex electronics produce complex force fields; it’s quite possible for a torsion spring to be affected by such a field. That’s not mysterious; but if gravity is affected I’d call it extraordinary evidence.

We can only wait for more results. But if I had to bet, so far I’d still bet that they have found a demonstration of flawed testing principles, rather than disproving Newton.

I have to confess that I am more than a little confused here. My understanding is that the correct way to determine whether science is correct or not is to take a poll of scientists in mostly unrelated fields.

A hell beyond

Karl Popper said: “Those who promise us paradise on earth never produced anything but a hell.” Think about how badly the promises of multicultural utopia through diversity have gone, and then think about the level of hell that experimenting with the entire food chain in search of transspecies utopia could lead:

The well-being of large and long-lived free-living mammals could be secured even with today’s technologies. Expanding the circle of compassion further is more technically challenging. Until a couple of years ago, I’d have spoken in terms of centuries. For sociological rather than technical reasons, I still think this kind of timescale is more credible for safeguarding the well-being of humans, transhumans and the humblest of nonhuman animals alike.

Certainly, until the CRISPR revolution, talk of extending an abolitionist ethic beyond vertebrates sounded fanciful because compassionate interventions would pass from recognisable extensions of existing technologies to a speculative era of mature nanotechnology, self-replicating nanobots and marine drones patrolling the oceans. For me, the final piece of the abolitionist jigsaw only fell into place after reading Eric Drexler’s Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology (1986) — a tantalizing prospect, but not a scenario readily conceivable in our lifetime.
 


Then came CRISPR. Even sober-minded scientists describe the CRISPR revolution as “jaw-dropping”. Gene drives can spread genetic changes to the rest of the population.

Whether for large iconic vertebrates or obscure uncharismatic bugs, the question to ask now is less what’s feasible but rather, what’s ethical? What kinds of consciousness, and what kinds of sentient being do we want to exist in the world? 

Naturally, just because a pan-species welfare state is technically feasible, there is no guarantee that some sort Garden of Eden will ever come to pass. Most people still find the idea of phasing out the biology of involuntary suffering in humans a fanciful prospect — let alone its abolition in nonhuman animals. The well-being of all insects sounds like the reductio ad absurdum of the abolitionist project. But here I’m going to be quite dogmatic. A few centuries from now, if involuntary suffering still exists in the world, the explanation for its persistence won’t be that we’ve run out of computational resources to phase out its biological signature, but rather that rational agents — for reasons unknown — will have chosen to preserve it.
 


Man never learns. In his attempts to improve the world, he has made things worse more often than he has made it better. The remarkable thing is that it is mostly people who believe evolution by natural selection has produced this world who are seeking to bring it to a crashing halt. I shudder to think the ways in which this latest plan for utopia could go awry and bring about a hell on Earth beyond the imagination of the average SF writer.

It does raise some interesting thoughts concerning the philosophical arguments against the existence of God related to the so-called problem of suffering. (I’ve always regarded them as rather stupid, but they do exist and therefore require addressing.) Since Man apparently has the power to end the “involuntary suffering” involved in the food chain, but thus far has declined to do so, is this similar evidence that he either a) does not exist, or b) is not benevolent?

Of Apple and NSA

This is not exactly shocking news, but it is disappointing all the same to learn that Apple is making it even easier for governments to spy on its users.

Apple has endowed iPhones with undocumented functions that allow unauthorized people in privileged positions to wirelessly connect and harvest pictures, text messages, and other sensitive data without entering a password or PIN, a forensic scientist warned over the weekend.

Jonathan Zdziarski, an iOS jailbreaker and forensic expert, told attendees of the Hope X conference that he can’t be sure Apple engineers enabled the mechanisms with the intention of accommodating surveillance by the National Security Agency and law enforcement groups. Still, he said some of the services serve little or no purpose other than to make huge amounts of data available to anyone who has access to a computer, alarm clock, or other device that has ever been paired with a targeted device.

Zdziarski said the service that raises the most concern is known as com.apple.mobile.file_relay. It dishes out a staggering amount of data—including account data for e-mail, Twitter, iCloud, and other services, a full copy of the address book including deleted entries, the user cache folder, logs of geographic positions, and a complete dump of the user photo album—all without requiring a backup password to be entered.

So much for that whole liberal countercultural vibe Apple has been riding for decades. It was one thing to construct a walled garden. It’s another to hand Big Brother a secret key to it.

What killed Technorati

Technorati has gone the way of The Truth Laid Bear and many of the blogs it once ranked:

Once upon a time, not long ago, anyone in the world who wanted to gauge the relative impact of any blogger—say, HughHewitt.com vs. MichelleMalkin.com or Instapundit vs. Daily Kos or Fark vs. Eschaton—knew exactly where to go for the latest, up-to-the-moment rankings: Technorati. During the salad days of blogging in the first decade of the 21st century, nobody could touch Technorati when it came to searching and sizing up the roiling mass of hot-blooded humanity that came to be known as the blogosphere. You could forget all about the New York Times Best Sellers list. That was dead-tree media ranking other dead trees. The Technorati “Top 100 Blogs” was America’s ultimate guide to influence. It was the scorecard of the hat-tip champions.

Alas, those days are now done.

With little fanfare last month, Technorati quietly shut down its blog directory and rankings.

It’s not hard to understand why bloggers eventually lost interest in both blog-ranking systems. I know why I did. Neither system paid sufficient attention to their core market, and both allowed non-blogs to freely enter the rankings, which promptly pushed down the blogs that had once been ranked highly, even when they had considerably more traffic than they did before.  This old post is informational in that regard:

According to Sitemeter, there were 2,000 visits yesterday on only the 12th day of this blog. Thanks for stopping by, everyone! The Truth Laid Bear even had Vox Popoli ranked in the Blogosphere’s top 150, much to my surprise.

There were 17,245 Sitemeter visits here and at AG yesterday (40,304 Google Pageviews to use the modern metric), and yet even that 69 percent annual growth probably would not suffice to put me within shouting distance of the top 150 blogs today, much less the big corporate sites.

What both NZ Bear and Technorati should have done was to maintain a very clear distinction between site-rankings and blog-rankings, thereby preventing the situation where the corporate site equivalents of the Dallas Cowboys were being compared to SEC, Ivy League, and high school teams. It simply wasn’t even remotely meaningful for the proprietor of a little sewing blog or whatever to be informed that Fox News, CNN, and Jezebel got more traffic than she did. What had once been a useful comparison became an irrelevant statement of the obvious.

The other problem was sub-par metrics. Technorati, for example, put too much value on links in lieu of actual traffic. That’s why blogs like Whatever were so ludicrously overrated (and why their proprietors were always careful to conceal their actual traffic metrics), because they did a good job of cross-linking and driving up their Technorati rating at the expense of less-linked, but better-trafficked blogs.

In any event, to paraphrase Glenn Reynolds, the ranking systems come and go, but we are still here.